Next Level Pros - #60: Amin Shaykho: Founder Of Kadama, Forbes 30 Under 30, Over 1 Million Users

Starting point is 00:00:00 Get ready to be inspired by Amin Sheikho, a trailblazing entrepreneur and sophomore engineer. He's the mastermind behind Kadama, an educational platform that soared to immense popularity with millions of users and a staggering social media following. Amin's achievements landed him a coveted spot on Forbes 30 under 30 list, and he's also a TED speaker. His tech expertise was honed at Apple, where he contributed to projects like iMessage and Health. With his team, Amin raised a remarkable $1.7 million seed round for Kadama, which achieved a number two peak ranking in the App Store's education category and amassed over 2.5 million followers and 1 billion views on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Please welcome Amin Sheikho.

Starting point is 00:00:49 Yo, yo, yo, welcome to another episode of the Founder Podcast. Today, I am joined live and in person with Mr. Amin Sheikho. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Excited to have you. So Amin is a little bit different than some of the other founders that we've had. He is a very young founder. He's got a really cool technology platform that he is building with, let me pronounce this correctly, Kadama. Is that correct? Kadama. I heard it. I screwed up. You'll get it the next time. Remind me, what does Kadama mean? Kadama basically means service in Arabic and it's an app that connects students

Starting point is 00:01:26 and tutors to get homework help. Yeah, cool. Man, 25 years old? Yeah. Woo! Man, so my listeners know

Starting point is 00:01:35 when I was 25 years old, like I was in the middle of my first startup and about a year away from bankruptcy. Oh, God. So, you know, so when I was

Starting point is 00:01:44 a little bit older than you, I was worth way less than you. And yeah, man. So that's cool. You've got some really cool things in your life. You know, it's always a physical roller coaster, to be honest. That's what I call it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm always intrigued by young entrepreneurs because, you know, really the rule in entrepreneurship is a lot lot of time a lot of effort over a long period of time usually leads to results in their 40s 50s 60s and 70s right and then every once a while there's kind of these these wild cards that are able to you know cheat basically there's they're not that cheap but but, but the system doesn't necessarily work out that way.

Starting point is 00:02:27 Mark Zuckerberg, for example, he was in it for the long haul. He was in it to change the world. And he was able to hit it clear, the right opportunity, the right experience, the right timing on everything. And so, interested to hear your story. So you're from the west side of Washington. So I mean, flew in today from the 32-minute flight. Yeah, 31 minutes. Awesome. You ever been over here to the east? First time and I guess great place to be

Starting point is 00:02:56 for the first time, right? Yeah, that's crazy. You can grow up in a state, you never visit the east side of the state. I feel bad saying this, but Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond is probably where i spent all my time oh man berkland i guess crazy crazy so we occasionally make it over to the west side usually for a seahawks game or you know some of the uh you know go to the big city yeah i so i grew up in this area i've lived all over the

Starting point is 00:03:20 country though yeah i've moved 14 different times with with my wife or not so but uh but sounds like so you work or you live part of the time in in uh the bellevue seattle area and then where's the other part of time a lot of time in california um but mostly los angeles now it used to be in san francisco but it's always between the two so we have our offices in bellevue but with the social media you know know, LA is the place to be. Nice, nice. Big internet personality, right? Like you got a pretty big following on Instagram, Snapchat. Tell us a little bit about that. That's exactly what it is. Like, honestly, we started off with a color brand.

Starting point is 00:03:55 I was like, hey, why not scale to the YM? And so we started off with the life hacks, teaching you how to quickly find if your girl's cheating on you, for example. Something that you love, right? Or a quick way to like write an email and then now showing them more of what I do behind the scenes, like running a company, flying around, traveling, meeting other cool people and slowly turning it into that. And that's what they want to see. So I'm just creating what they want. Awesome. You went to university and graduated there and then ended up working at Apple, right? So tell us about that experience

Starting point is 00:04:25 yeah no I literally like um I went to University of Washington started computer science I was able to graduate when I was 20 because I took a lot of college classes in high school nice which was pretty cool but you know the thing is when I first oh Apple was always my dream company I was the biggest art fan every product and I remember they came to career fair I was like dang this is gonna be my shot to work here and Apple was like something that everybody would say, you're never going to get this because it was down in Cupertino or in California. There's no big offices here. And so everybody coming in, people are saying, you're just no way going to do it. And I applied and I actually made it, you know, a good amount through the interview process.

Starting point is 00:04:58 I really thought I was going to get it. Did you know anybody on the inside? No. And that's why I actually got rejected the first time around. I was super disappointed but i think maybe they lacked my energy six months later i get an email saying hey you know would love to fly you directly down to copertino to meet the team in the big apple spaceship i was like wait what no interviews sounds good book me the next flight and i flew in and like it was pretty nerve-wracking so did apple pay for the flight oh of course uh first class everything i think that

Starting point is 00:05:24 was like the first time somebody paid for my flight, right? And I told my parents, oh, wow. And I get there and like I'm in a room with six people just interviewing me like every single angle. And they hit me with so many questions. But I think I did pretty good because the next day I get a call from the director. He's like, would love to have you. Secured the offer. And literally like, and the crazy thing is, all this happened in the summer.

Starting point is 00:05:46 And usually for internships, actually, they kind of, like, invite you much earlier in the process. So it was sold last second. And so I wasn't even expecting to have an internship that summer. And then literally one week later, I fly down and start a whole new chapter there and in the Bay Area. So did it start out as an internship and later turn into a job? Or it started out as a job? It actually was a full-time job. I had applied for the internship earlier on and then I didn't get the internship. But the next time they reached out was directly for a full-time job as a software engineer. Interesting. So you started out as a software engineer.

Starting point is 00:06:17 How long did you work there? What was the experience like? So it's crazy because during that time I was working on my startup. And so I wasn't a typical computer scientist. I was more of like an entrepreneur. So in my mind, I was already dealing with marketing, operations, design. And, you know, I do like coding, but it doesn't really fulfill me as much as everything else. And so really quickly, my manager realized that. And there was this side project that actually came up within Apple. It's a special project.

Starting point is 00:06:42 That's what they call them. And he was like, hey, like, do you want to be part of this? And you get to do a little bit of everything. And so me and two people worked on it. And I actually can talk about it right now because it's public. But when I created the first prototype, I imagined like, this is amazing. Let us present this to the director. So you put me in a one-on-one meeting with the director. I presented it. And he was like, oh my God, this needs to be seen. And so what was it? It was, you know, an iMessage when you can reply directly to people you can mention people on all that stuff yep when i came up with the idea

Starting point is 00:07:11 iMessage was a pretty dead you know dead kind of chatting app and the whole vision i had as a Gen Z was like all the kids and everybody's spending all their time on messenger on instagram and snapchat they're not using the core features so i was like like, that was my whole pitch. And I tell that to the VP, he's like, we need to get this to Craig, who's the CTO around here, the CEO. And I sit there for 15 minutes, it was just the CTO and the old five VPs, the entire software in Oregon, like, listen, I'm 20.

Starting point is 00:07:37 I understand what the audience wants in this age. We need to have this. Even if you guys think it's intrusive, just make it so it's not completely visible, right? And literally the next year ships out in the ios and there we go and since then all i've been doing apple with special projects so that that was your idea like the the direct the direct messaging being able to reply to a group message directly to somebody be able to highlight it that's pretty cool yeah i don't mean to other people it wasn't a revolutionary idea but it was more like apple didn't have it. And we thought that if they added to their ecosystem, it will increase users for their

Starting point is 00:08:08 product. Here's the reality. And I always think about this, like whether you're talking about Amazon, Apple, or some of these huge tech companies, Boeing for whatever, you know, when you got like 70,000 employees. Like, first of all, I can't imagine working in north shark or chart like that right just like the little amount that you actually mean to that organization is like so microscopic and so like how do i move the needle how do i even make a dent in this huge ecosystem what am i am how do i be recognized as a winner or even a loser? Like what defines me in that position?

Starting point is 00:08:47 So like for me as an entrepreneur, like that would be extremely difficult to find myself in the middle of this ginormous org chart. Like how do I even find self-validation? And so, you know, the fact that you were able to make a dent in the world's largest organization, that's pretty impressive. You know, to your point, like I would say like a startup, you're like operating a watermelon, the full watermelon, where Apple is more like you're charging a small grape, but even the grape could be valued more than the watermelon, right? But and there's pros and cons. I'm not lying.

Starting point is 00:09:15 Like there's a lot of things out. And Apple was all amazing. But at the end of the day, being an entrepreneur is something else. And I would never trade it for anything else. What would you say was the best part about working at apple well first of all you'll never be in a situation where you're sleeping on the floor because the whole world is collapsing it's all on you um and i think a lot of things learning being able to work with so many smart people a lot of the practices that i apply in my company today like design attention to detail um even though the the worst thing working

Starting point is 00:09:44 corporate is the hierarchy how to do anything has to get so many approvals so slow my startup right now it takes us two days to do something that would take like two months at apple right it would make sense if they care about their reputation um but luckily when i went in like they immediately noticed i actually work on special products so a lot of things i was working on were completely new it wasn't like you know fixing a small little thing in the mail app. It was like the second day I worked on was the Apple research app, which connects to your watch and your phone and allows doctors to do studies on their patients. And I actually did exactly what you do at a startup.

Starting point is 00:10:16 I built the prototype internally. I spoke to legal, spoke to design, and I got a lot of people within Apple to use it, to validate it. And then we passed it to the production team, which actually built it for production. So cool. So it's interesting. So since then, so you had your startup. You started right out of high school. You were running it while you were going to college, while you were attending or working for Apple.

Starting point is 00:10:41 And so initially, there's essentially been three different iterations of Kadamon. Am I saying that right? I told you you'd get it this time. I got it. Nice, nice. So what were the three different iterations and like, what are the different phases that you've gone through as a startup and like really getting it to the point where it is today? There were three phases. Phase one, obviously 2017, phase two, 2019. And the big phase, the pandemic was changing the game. Initially we're naive, right? We had an idea where we wanted to make an affordable platform to connect you with any service provider. Housework, errands, there's 13 other ones. And tutoring was one of them, of course. And when you're naive, you don't know you were 18 with no entrepreneurship experience, no business, you really don't know much better um but it turns out that each one of those services has its own market and there's another 100 million dollar company trying to solve that problem and you know we tried to work on it but the chicken egg problem was almost impossible to solve um we would get the providers we won't we won't have enough customers and people would leave

Starting point is 00:11:38 and um but eventually uh you know because we were so up in with the school, we got invited to Accelerator, the University of Washington Jones Foster Accelerator. Very, very competitive. They only accept six teams a year. And if you make it through, they'll give you a $25,000 grant. Plus, they'll pair you up with successful mentors. And in that process, it was around 2019, they taught us to focus on only a few services. And if you guys get that right, you can go up. But then eventually we ended up narrowing it down to tutoring.

Starting point is 00:12:08 And that was a whole ballgame on its own. So we're like, okay, we're just going to worry about this for now. And, you know, fast forward into early 2020, we're ready to get our first customers. At this point, we were in-person tutoring. So that was the second pivot. And we get our first few customers. We see real cash coming from a paying customer. Pandemic hits, everything shuts down.

Starting point is 00:12:29 Our entire business is about to go to zero. And so I'll pause here, but then there was around six months until we realized the potential of a virtual platform, social media, and it was literally the prime time of COVID where we basically iterate to our third version of what Kodama is today. So what is Kodama today?

Starting point is 00:12:48 Today, it's the most downloaded Gen Z tutoring app since 2020. We have millions of customers using us and the second most followed social media, education social media brand ever right behind Duolingo, which is a billion dollar company.

Starting point is 00:13:00 And again, we built this with no funding, just three co-founders. We're all under the age of 22. We've facilitated like close to half a million tutoring sessions on the app. It feels like a social media, but for Gen Z and just for getting homework help. Can you tell me how many tutors are utilizing this platform? At any moment in time, there's around anywhere between 30,000 to 50,000 active tutors.

Starting point is 00:13:23 And the cool thing about this is, and let's be honest, right? Any of you who are a student or if you're a parent, you know your kids are procrastinating. They're getting help at like 2 a.m., 1 a.m., right? That's when they open up their laptop to get to work. The tutoring center is closed at 6 p.m. So instead of having to force your kids when they're not trying to be there, on our app at 1 a.m., they have a tutor that's going to help them.

Starting point is 00:13:46 And there's somebody there age two who are probably also studying for their other class. Imagine they're only two years ahead in school. And so, like, what subjects? Is it any subjects? And what is the typical cost to the end user? Like, how does that work? Yeah, and think of almost all the high school classes. For the first two years of college, a little bit to the third for math, sciences, geology, all those things.

Starting point is 00:14:09 And the average cost is around $30 per, and it's not by hour, it's actually by amount of work. Something we realized with these students is that they're never seeking the time frame of, I want to get tutoring for X hours. It's more like, oh my God, this is due in 30 minutes i just need help on this so the tutor will look at it be like okay let's just do this much for it and 30 is averaging um it's actually way below um the other option like all the tutoring centers um they're usually around 50 to 60 an hour so somebody who doesn't come up from a well-off family can't really use those resources and the school obviously they have free tutoring but they're so limited on hours like maybe like two options for like two hours a day at the end of the day like

Starting point is 00:14:49 students it's not like they don't plan for when they get a homework call it's based on needed urgency it's like when you need to get an uber right when you need it you need it and so that's what we offered them awesome awesome so where where did this idea originally spring from me and my two other co-founders we both have have been tutors. Actually, being a tutor was my first job ever. I think I was 16. I was a tutor at Bellevue College. So we were both students and tutors. And the biggest problem we saw on the student side is they're boring. They're expensive. We just don't want to be there. And we're like, there's so many other platforms that make it fun for the customer. How come this one just seems like it's always out of force? And then especially for the tutors, it was like very non-flexible.

Starting point is 00:15:28 They usually pay you fixed hours. And so we're like, what if we can build a job? You can work anytime on your own schedule and make it so you can get paid the most. So you get to set your own rates as a tutor. And if you go on Indeed.com, and this is submission by tutors, we actually pay above average. It's green. Like they put you red, yellow, green. We're green with a positive arrow. And that shows that they're actually pay above average is green like they put you red yellow green we're green the positive era and that shows that they're getting paid above average i think our top

Starting point is 00:15:49 tutor has made four hundred thousand dollars in two years so he actually graduated from college and instead of going to his full-time engineering job he's been a full-time tutor for us that's um and and again especially as a college student some are making like forty thousand dollars a year 15 that's good money uh it's just because what we do is we have a very good algorithm, just like how social media is. We favor good tutors and we give them higher paying customers. So I don't want to get too advanced here, but it's very, very...

Starting point is 00:16:16 So how does one become a tutor on the platform? Do they have to pass a certain test? Yeah, help me understand. Yeah, you'll find the app, you just apply. Everything's in the app. so you submit your transcripts you take a few quizzes based on the subjects you want to take we'll do a background check on you and then let's say you get hired in real time we're evaluating performance from each user submission how fast it took me to do a job complaints and in real time if we detect something's going off we'll pull you out of the system maybe we'll do a manual review if you're doing good we'll start giving you more students and um and

Starting point is 00:16:49 so it's it's there's not only an onboarding process where we do the vetting there's also real-time 24-7 yeah and uh what age yeah can can tutors start on your platform yeah no most of our tutors are the age of 18 to 22 obviously there's olderors, but I would say we focus on the college age, which is good because they actually, they don't have to charge as much as somebody who's full-time and depends on it. Yeah, right, right. Now, it's such an interesting concept.

Starting point is 00:17:14 So, you know, the fact that you built essentially a software company, right, a technology company through bootstrapping, I know at this point, you've raised a little bit of money. Actually, up to the point where we raised the street round, we were on 100%, no dilution.

Starting point is 00:17:28 We had, all the money was from winning competitions or, and then the initial $30,000 was from just me and my co-founder getting a summer job back in 2017 and using that to initially fund the initial version V1 of the app. So we had $70,000

Starting point is 00:17:43 before we raised our almost two million dollar round it's amazing so you talk about competition so there there was this competition at university of washington were there additional competitions that you're part of yeah the biggest resource as a student entrepreneur is pull every single opportunity there because they'll treat you differently and even to this how i keep my university of washington id with me sometimes i'll go to a place like oh i'm still a student and trust me to cheat differently um but the point is like so we we applied um for one competition um we didn't make it the first time around we learned exactly what got us what what we did wrong the second time we go in um we we moved from the top 136 to the top 36 and at that

Starting point is 00:18:22 point it was like the final so we didn't make it past that. And then from there, we got invited to this solid I told you about where we get our first $25,000. And at that point, we had mastered our pitch. And given the traction we had at that point,

Starting point is 00:18:33 we were well above other student startups. So we applied to this, it's called the Northwestern University. It's actually somewhere close. I forgot the exact name, but it was another Washington school. They were like,

Starting point is 00:18:44 if you went first place to get $10 dollars we flew to first place like everything was perfect and so we got another ten thousand dollar check and we we used that thirty five thousand dollars for literally the entire operation until we eventually were able to secure a seed round which was like i would say around a year and a half later so when you're when you're first getting going and you're utilizing just you know the 35 000 like who's doing your programming like what uh you know was this you writing the code were you outsourcing some of it like tell me about like some of those early days of getting the same off the ground yeah and by the way there's also a whole other story where for one of the competitions you know when you're a brand new entrepreneur you don't take failure lightly one of the competitions we You know, when you're a brand new entrepreneur, you don't take failure lightly. One of the competitions we lost,

Starting point is 00:19:26 I thought we lost because our idea sucks and I was so close to giving up. It influenced me so much, I ended up giving a TED talk about it, right? And I can dive down into that. But in terms of the early days, I would say when we launched in 2017, all the way until 2019,

Starting point is 00:19:40 we had used the $30,000 we secured from the internships, which we somehow finessed because we had no experience getting those to fund contractors overseas. And that was a maddening process because back in the day, I thought computer science building app was just one thing. When it turns out there's multiple components, like there's designing the app, there's engineering the app,

Starting point is 00:19:59 there's product management. And so I would tell these contractors at three months, I expect this, right? And I would never communicate to them again again and obviously they're getting no leadership or anything so they end up falling behind they call me three months later like now we're gonna need another six months and i'm like furiating i'm like what do you mean like this was supposed to only be a six-month process right and and then i realized well it's because i never gave them design so they were they were trying to figure out designs it was the ugliest app i could probably send you photos to see and through that process i realized oh well there's a design process that was my first time ever realizing i

Starting point is 00:20:31 need to design stuff and give it to them because all they're supposed to do is engineer and i also learned that you're supposed to um be a project manager which basically means split tasks for them set up ongoing meetings to make sure things were going on schedule so it was a lot of learning lessons but in those two years while i learning that, I was also learning how to code and my co-founder was learning business. So by the time 2019 hits, I was able to slowly take over building the app and he was able to use his business to get us into competitions. And again, we were still completely new into it. So we weren't by means means any good but we at least know how to get started at that point and we slowly started teaching ourselves and then you know as i got into apple

Starting point is 00:21:10 that year too so i was learning a lot of skills there and obviously by the time 2020 hits contractors are gone it was us three me my co-founder with the business side and my brother um we were literally doing everything ourselves at that point so regarding the contractors i was doing most of the codings and social media or product social media my other co-founder day was doing a lot of social media and then the third one more one was doing the business logistics operations and that was just it for like i would say since like 2020 all the way through 2021 until we finally raised money and now we can actually hire people to do these things for us awesome so i mean obviously entering all these different competitions you're you're very we finally raised money and now we can actually hire people to do these things for us. Awesome.

Starting point is 00:21:50 So, I mean, obviously entering all these different competitions, you're very competitive by nature. Yeah. What led to your competitive nature? What from your childhood sprung that in you that you wanted to win or really drives you? What are some maybe past experiences that you draw on that push you through these type of things i'm not a lot i don't think i was always competitive i was always competitive i don't think i was also a public speaker i was also a lot very well kind of reserved myself you know i told you i grew up my my family arab american i was the first here all my friends were new everything even holidays everything was new to me and sometimes i felt like i stood out and i would be too embarrassed to share who I was and I would keep things to me but the one thing since I was a very young kid that I knew

Starting point is 00:22:30 at the end of the day like I just realized if I do get it academically you're gonna get a 4.0 and maintain it it will open opportunities for me and I never knew what that would mean right but the only focus I had in life was I gotta get that 4.0 through school and that taught me a lot of discipline and it also taught me a lot of discipline and it also taught me to work really really hard which is my biggest characteristic I don't think I have the highest IQ in the room but I think I could outwork anybody in the room because I will it doesn't matter if I have to be up I'm gonna do it right I don't tell me so tell me more about that like what is outworking anybody in the room look like as in it doesn't matter how sad i'm feeling that day it doesn't matter how if it seems like there's no way out of a failure

Starting point is 00:23:10 or a challenge i will never take that as answer i will leverage every resource i have i'll think outside the box i will do whatever it takes to get out of that scenario um and i can give you examples later on but that mentality will help you know it was it was derived from like maintaining my good grades and eventually uh when i started you know for example my mom introduced me to this cost when i was a kid very young in middle school she's like you know take all your old stuff and um sell them to instead of just throwing them in your closet you should just resell them to your brother so your old xbox games or your old clothes and she kind of introduced this closet of basically like business where like you take something if you don't want and resell it for a profit and she taught me negotiation

Starting point is 00:23:47 right and back in the day i even know i like i really didn't know what that would do for me but it was just something she made me do and then at the same time i was telling you earlier this you know the syrian civil war happened you know i my family's from syria and i just saw like over a million children lose everything no food, like hundreds of thousands died. And I was like, damn, like if this was me, literally just one generation behind, that could have been me. And it made me feel grateful for what I have. And that inspired me to want to volunteer.

Starting point is 00:24:14 So I started helping local nonprofits, the local needy here, because to me at that point, it felt like the best thing I can do because I can't do anything directly overseas. And so you can see here, like on the discipline from chasing the 4.0 GPA um this kind of business class my mom taught me that and then um I would say uh when I was in the Bellevue College I actually um did this program where I could go to Bellevue College which is a community college during my last years of high school so I would be finishing up high school and getting an AA degree at the same time and when they put me in that environment, in a college environment as a 16-year-old,

Starting point is 00:24:48 for the first time ever, I realized, and I was in a community that was diverse. Because I would say my school, I used, I was kind of literally one of three air people, just people, person of color in general. And I kind of stood out. But when I was in this community, everybody was different. And being different didn't mean anything anymore. And I was, there's so much value in having people, imagine somebody from this country, somebody from this country, or somebody with this skill set,

Starting point is 00:25:09 somebody with this skill set, coming together to create something. And it's more powerful than 50 people with the same mentality. And that inspired me to make my own club called Code for Care, where the whole premise, they actually built up all the other values I told you,

Starting point is 00:25:22 where we would build mobile applications to help nonprofits make their stuff more efficient and i was a 17 year old in college all of them like you know much older than me and i had this vision and i was like okay well if i want to create this club i need to get approval from one of the advisors there like one of the teachers so i go to my computer science teacher i'm like hey i want to make this club um and trust me i'm going to put a lot of effort. It's going to be good. And the first thing he told me was like,

Starting point is 00:25:47 you really think I'm going to trust you to build a computer science club when you just took the first computer science class? I know you have no idea what you're doing. And every person who does this is just trying to do it to get into college and to get to university, right? Right. And I just walked out because he wouldn't budge. He wouldn't sign the paper.

Starting point is 00:26:01 So I somehow convinced 20 people. I was like, if we go and mob his office we will literally 20 people crowd his office we won't let him get out until he signs it i think we get something going so i literally walk and i kick the door open i'm like iverson we're doing the club and he's like fine i'll it's not it's not a pan out he signs it off we create the club great nobody knew what they were doing but it what it taught me was what it meant to be a leader, leading multiple people. And that kind of, along with everything else, gave me the foundation for what it means to build a startup, to build a startup. And literally like five months later, the summer hits when I graduated and I started working on my company, Potomac.

Starting point is 00:26:39 That's awesome. That's awesome. So you talk about outworking someone. Give me some examples. What does your workday look like for you when you're just busting your butt? Let me give you an example. When we're brand new, there's a good amount of competitors who are trying to do something while we're doing it. I'll teach another virtual tuner guy. And when they start to notice we're getting traction on social media, they would literally make fake accounts and DM us or try to flag our account. They'd be like, you're going to fail. Your app is trash is trash garbage and we know it's that like we're not dumb right we can tell like who is he following he's following the company account right and we're like okay they're gonna play this dirty game so we're gonna outwork them what does that mean

Starting point is 00:27:16 we're making six to seven videos every day on tiktok that's like nine hours of work we're not leaving a room we're gonna get as many downloads as possible to go on after a trudge and push them behind. And, you know, unfortunately, sometimes you have to be ruthless in business.

Starting point is 00:27:31 Six months later, they have never made a new app update on their app since. Because what happened, we became the prominent Gen Z tutoring app and they were also

Starting point is 00:27:39 trying to target Gen Z. And we built a social media. Like we, I think they had 10,000 followers or something. When they started off, we were brand new. Within three months, we had a million followers and like that's it we're the biggest in the game at that point um and so um i'm telling what i'm telling you eight hours a day

Starting point is 00:27:54 just doing social media and then another four hours trying to build a product and i think if i'm lucky sleeping five or six hours and doing this every single day. I'm telling you, for around two years straight, 60, 70, 80 hours every single week. And I literally told myself, everything's coming out of my life. Like besides checking up on my family and my close friends here and there, I'm not going to go see a movie.

Starting point is 00:28:18 I'm not going to go to a game. I'm going to tell all my other friends, hey, like I just can't. And I was off the grid. And I was willing to make those sacrifices. And it's very hard. I'm telling you, sometimes you'd go weeks, just going through failure after failure

Starting point is 00:28:31 as an entrepreneur. But in the back of my mind, I was like, I'm going to build the biggest Gen Z tutoring app ever. And if it sucks right now, I'm going to figure out how to get out of here later. And that's it. Grind, grind, grind, grind, grind.

Starting point is 00:28:42 Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, man. It's cool to see. what are the future plans? What do you hope that Karma becomes? Is it IPO? Is it sell it off to a strategic investor? Is it run it for the rest of your life? How do you see this thing playing out?

Starting point is 00:28:59 So first of all, it's cool that we turned the company into a profit. It's made my life way easier. I don't have to strive all the time. Seeing a positive P&l is very nice right um uh we i think we conquered uh in-person tutoring for gen z like we like any gen z who gets tutoring they've heard of us they've seen us how they're either following us or they're subscribed there's a good amount um but now with with ai artificial intelligence language learning models on with AI, which is literally making a Gen Z tutor, an AI that sounds like Gen Z. It says things like Riz was good buddy, blood,

Starting point is 00:29:32 all these words that you see in the TikTok and social media comments, right? Anybody over the age of 25 is probably like, what am I saying? But trust me, it's a secret lingo that these kids have. And having an emotional AI, because the one thing i ever told you earlier was i would say we're we're the biggest text-based tutoring app ever most tutoring is actually in person or recall our customers they don't leave the kids how often you see them all the time they're usually texting and so we have so much data on that and um they also express emotions through that so we can leverage an emotional ai and um

Starting point is 00:30:05 we also can use our tutors as a backbone so unlike other ais where if it doesn't know the answer either try it's best to give it to you and sometimes give you the wrong answer or just tell you i can't help you if we detect any of that um we'll actually take you to a human tutor in real life who probably has been serving early on we're comfortable with them so that's a big pivot obviously we've had acquisition offers. Some people have wanted to acquire social media. We've had other tech companies try to mirror what we're doing. And we've obviously had people want to come and acquire a product.

Starting point is 00:30:34 But I think where we're at right now, there's still a huge road ahead. And I explore all options, but I think there's still room to make impact running it. And worrying about that would probably be something I think about a few years from now. Right. But ultimately, looking for an exit. When you think about it from a space like this, right, in education, there's not that many big IPO companies.

Starting point is 00:31:00 Most of them are actually acquired. There's literally a few tech companies that are IPO. The big ones you can name them like chad delingo there's a few others but that's pretty much it and most of them are actually outside of what we do they're like imagine like post-college like corsair and stuff like that right so in our space there's not that many options right so um the the norm is like all my best friends are i think they've all been acquired right so it is the path of obviously it is pretty fun to keep running this, right? So I explore all options. And at the end of the day, it's just what the outcome comes out to be.

Starting point is 00:31:30 Let's shift here. So one of the things we were talking about earlier before the show was your ability to utilize influence on social media, right? So how have you been able to hack your way into large followings or or viral videos like what are some of the best practices that you utilize there well we'll start with the economy founding story um in 2020 i remember seeing social media pop up or in this case tiktok right and back in 2020 is a huge stigma everybody was calling it a dancing app for kids it was embarrassing to be on it i remember telling my co-workers

Starting point is 00:32:06 about it and they're like, wait, are you telling me that this app where my little like seven-year-old does the cringy dances? Yup.

Starting point is 00:32:13 That's exactly what I'm trying to say. And the reason I was so stubborn about wanting to try it out was because I was seeing so many people go viral. And at the end of the day,

Starting point is 00:32:21 you know, me being that age, I do like followers as a currency, being able to reach people as a currency. And I was like, and during that time, it was much easier to become viral. A hundred percent, you know, me being that age, I do like followers as a currency, being able to reach people as a currency. And I was like. And during that time, it was much easier to become viral.

Starting point is 00:32:28 A hundred percent. You know, because everybody was embarrassed. Right. We were, I'm telling you, they did case studies for our company. We made Forbes 130 because of what we did to get it. So I'm telling you, we were pioneered. A lot of companies, whatever we were doing. And I remember I was like, okay, well, I don't want, like my mentors, they don't embarrass our name.

Starting point is 00:32:44 And I was like, you know what, fine, I'll go make my own personal channel. So I make my new account, zero followers. And I was like, what's something I can do that will get people to like comment? So In-N-Out, it's a hamburger place, but it's very controversial because people either love it or hate it. And I was like, I'm going to get my friend to eat it and we'll see what happens. And when he took a bite into it, it was very suspenseful. He takes a bite, starts chewing it. Everybody like, it's aiming at his face. I'm zooming in and all of a sudden he's like this is disgusting

Starting point is 00:33:09 and instantly the comments went crazy people were like what do you mean it's disgusting this is the best burger ever and then people like no he's right so this war went viral and i'm like video after video i'm getting a million views million views like oh my god this is i don't care what anybody's saying i'm making a comment channel right now and we're gonna do it and my brother and i sit down we start brainstorming ideas and we're like okay well everybody knows education is boring it's either a parent selling to the parent or selling to the school who and both of them will just force it down the kid's throat but that's not going to be appealing to student because what students find appealing is not the same as what parents find appealing and so we're like okay, we're not going to post boring educational videos.

Starting point is 00:33:46 Instead, let's think bigger picture. What falls under education? Well, teaching people about when you can get 50% off Starbucks or how you can save 30% shopping at Walmart or how to know if somebody put you on red on Snapchat. Or I told you, like, if somebody tells you they deleted a message, how you recover that you know some you know just things that kids will like and you know some of them were toxic a little bit but whatever would work and video after video these laptops would go popular and we were one of the first pioneers to kind of create these quick 10 second showing you very fast paced something lt um at value and they were all optimized for you know kids and

Starting point is 00:34:22 even at that point it was online learning because of the pandemic people were doing zoom classes and a lot the truth is a lot of them would just like fall asleep during those classes and so we taught them like for example one fun joke was like well here's an extension you could do that will just move your cursor so your computer never sleeps that way you can go sleep and come back right just things that would go viral right and um literally within three months we had a massive following and then we go back to our mentors and they're like oh nice you have followers but i still see zero dollars in revenue i'm like you don't understand you don't understand let me tell you what we're doing right now on exactly right now we have eyes from all of our target customers so now it's time for us to go build in a video that's going to get us the downloads and we're like we time for us to go build a video that's gonna get us the downloads.

Starting point is 00:35:05 And we're like, we're not gonna go build a, we're not gonna go make a boring video. What can we do to catch attention of somebody who's 18, 16, 17, 20? Well, we're gonna go grocery shopping. We're gonna get an onion. We're gonna put Chick-fil-A sauce on it and take a huge bite out of it.

Starting point is 00:35:19 And then we're gonna segment to three apps are gonna give you a good grade on your homework. We snuck in our app in the middle, so it doesn't look like an ad and we said get this app guarantee 4.0 and when i'm telling you this video got 4 million views and 30 000 downloads i'm not underplaying it we shot up the after charts 30 000 downloads from one video yes to like number seven number seven and start investor by the way i had no idea what a venture capital was i had no idea what venture dude i had nothing i had no idea what vc meant anything right we got so many people say hey what do you guys work on this is amazing we'd love to set up calls and i remember that day i think i was on a jog um i run back home i kicked i and the second time i

Starting point is 00:35:59 kicked the door open into my brother's room because we lived together at that point right i'm like we're not sleeping four more videos today and we started brainstorming idea after idea one was biting into a stick of deodorant one was hanging upside down in a pull-up bar millions of views millions of views million views like on the aftertaste we were i'm telling you at that point we're for a whole year hadn't never left the the app store charts and at that point now investors are reaching in we're setting up calls and there's a whole story there how like you know when the first time investor comes out to you think you're like like that cool like you're amazing right you're the top of the world and then you know it turns out investors gonna quickly turn you down and again i'm like i was

Starting point is 00:36:37 not used to getting it turned up from an investor so um there's a whole game plan there and i can talk about it later but you know i don't really usually read books. But I told my co-founder, we're going to go read two books on venture funding just to figure out what's a general partner, what's an associate. And then we learned, don't talk to associates, go straight to partners. You know, a whole game plan there. And then, obviously, there's a whole story that I'll pause here. But eventually, like six months later, we actually secure our first round of funding. That's so cool. Yeah, the power of social media is just remarkable.

Starting point is 00:37:08 Obviously, as a Gen Z yourself, you understand this. I mean, it's pretty much your whole life. For me, the, what do we call them? I'm the millennial. Like I'm on the edge of MySpace. Millennial. Yeah, and MySpace, you know, I, you know, I was pre-internet. You know, I remember when the internet came out when i

Starting point is 00:37:25 was like in fourth or fifth grade right and uh you know msn uh msn messenger when i was in high school was the way that we communicated with everybody i didn't have a cell phone until i was you know 22 years old you know and so it's it's a completely different mind shift right like so i i am heavily involved in social media now it's it's different right like running the podcast and different reels and those type of things what advice would you give whether it's to gen z or anyone as far as because like tiktok the rage i mean you can still go viral on tiktok but it's just harder way more difficult right right like i mean back then you have less competition more eyeballs

Starting point is 00:38:06 less competition essentially right like think about it not only was it not as tapped into there's not a lot of creators so imagine your content will have to be on the four you paid also it was during the pandemic when nobody was doing anything their life right tons of eyeballs no creators right yeah it was it was the perfect it was the perfect storm for anybody. What in 2023 would you say, or starting in 2024 now, would you say is like the best way to reach an audience through social media? If you had to start all over right now, zero audience, zero following, how would you go and gather attention? Luckily, I can actually give you an answer that's true because six months ago, I had almost no followers on my personal pages

Starting point is 00:38:47 and now they're close to 1.7 mil. So just six months ago, I was able to do a strategy that works. And obviously the game plan is different now. Since there's a lot more content and things out there, you know, a lot of things have already been done. But now it's an opportunity for you to learn. It's much easier to learn

Starting point is 00:39:02 because back in the day, even the platforms, you didn't know what works, what doesn't, because there was not much resources. You can be way more knowledgeable before coming in. And also, you can actually look at the different, let's say you want to enter a niche, let's say food, you can study them and see where is like a tangent or a pivot or even a unique twist that you can come in right uh that nobody has done before but has potential to garner eyes so maybe the way videos are being done uh isn't as fast-paced it gets people bored right they don't retain maybe you can come in and introduce a new style that's more fast-paced um so that's kind of the game plan um that i would take right now and uh that's actually exactly what i did with my personal brand. I was like, well, I'm not going to do what most other people do as a founder,

Starting point is 00:39:50 just shove a bunch of stuff of entrepreneurship startups because those people take so long, like literally years to get 20,000 followers. Let me go find the fastest growing angle I can take in social media. I don't care where it is. If it's literally like makeup, I'll probably do it, right? Just to build an initial following base. And then slowly, I'll pivot into wherever I want to go. And that's actually what I've been doing slowly. It's called cross-pollination, where at the end of the day, if you take any niche, you can actually connect to a different niche by slowly finding content that has overlap in shared audience, right?

Starting point is 00:40:21 And for me, at that point, it was diving down diving down into shopping deals food deals and just anything lifestyle a bit out of the iphone and tech world which became oversaturated but that's what we used to kickstart our Panama pages and the way I did it was like instead of show like being very complicated and explaining how you can go get like you know 30% off at a store I was very fast I was like just show up here show them this go to your down like it was straight to the point. Some, any dumb person or I am not calling my followers dumb, but like anybody can understand it very quickly.

Starting point is 00:40:50 And that was an angle that nobody else was doing. And I was successful at it. And so that's the game plan now. And again, it's still possible to grow. I would say right now, Instagram is probably the easiest. Snapchat is a bit of a different ballgame,

Starting point is 00:41:02 but it's also opportunity and even TikTok, right? And so there's still, there's still hope. It's just the way you go about it to be different and obviously if you have somebody or you're let's say you're older hiring somebody who is out of college or still in college part-time is going to be big because they're going to be giving you insights because they're probably using you 24 7 and if you are of the age then you probably already have the insights right and right i'm actually for um for the first time i obviously have a lot of employees for katama under my own my personal brand i'm actually about to make my first hire for a coffee creator and i made sure i hired a person right out of college who spent i looked at his screen time he spent like seven

Starting point is 00:41:38 hours a day on tiktok so he knows what he's doing crazy that's a lot uh so let's fast forward to a point that you exit you have a billion dollars in your bank yeah right yeah what do you do how are you living life differently what are you doing with your life i'm not gonna lie like i the the number one thing that motivates me and what what gets me the most exciting and fulfilled is when i see positive impact from what we created it's probably something cheesy everybody probably says it but you didn't think about it right like my thought I was we weren't too well off right almost everything I did have to work for my first macbook I had to find a way to pay for it right because um and everything I had to work hard for

Starting point is 00:42:18 and in general like my just seeing like obviously um other people struggling and stuff like that and even with our app today a lot of people that we could have never used a lot of our students like for example there's a story i always share like this girl came from india um concerned almost dropping out of school because she barely knew english and everything was hard for her and she was like i also didn't have money but when i was able to try you guys out as an affordable platform and connect with people who made me feel comfortable and made me want to be motivated to get good grades and she just got accepted to um or amazon actually um as a software engineer and these stories how we're just being able to impact people's lives just is what motivates me right and so with that much money uh what i'd want to do is be able to

Starting point is 00:43:02 make an impact on a greater scale and what i mean mean by that is, you've probably seen it, but they went to third graders or elementary student kids and they give them the biggest world problems like world hunger or the water crisis. And it turns out that a lot of the students gave pretty feasible solutions that would work out. And it's crazy to see how somebody that small can create a solution for something that we call one of the biggest problems in the world. And I feel like it's just we just need people who actually care enough. And there's people there, but I think we need more people to contribute to, like, building schools in areas where they don't have it, right?

Starting point is 00:43:36 Providing, you know, resources. And both in the United States, there's a lot of impact you can do here, but overseas, and I would want to spend all my time there, right? Being able to do that. Obviously, you know, I like cars and stuff like that, like that but you know probably spend a little bit on myself but that's what you were a car what car would you go and buy well my two favorite cars right now would be i think my next car that i would get is probably a urus um i just like how they're kind of low key um and i'm a very kind of interior looks looks person right now i drive i have two cars like the corvette stingrays really fast and i have the performance tesla which would be like it's

Starting point is 00:44:10 silent so you speak you drive by cops and they never look at you when you're zero to 16 three seconds right um and so uh that and obviously yeah and there's obviously some things like i would say most of my time would probably be focused on that. Awesome. Awesome. What are some books that have drastically impacted your journey to today? Obviously, you're still young and still got a lot to go. But what are some mentors or some books that have drastically changed your life? There's a few books I've read that have been monumental. For example, I literally lost the name, but it's a book that just taught you um how to condone yourself in a social setting whether it's business or anything for example like it teaches you things like sometimes not speaking a lot is actually good because um you don't accidentally reveal

Starting point is 00:44:54 information it makes it even change the dynamic in a room where people like damn like you know what's he thinking it gives you leverage in a negotiation and stuff like that i forgot the name i can get you later but in terms of mentors um i've across my journey journey um i've met people like the ceo of opera it's an i'm sure you've heard of it it's a good buying and selling app he actually lives in belvey really close to me cool and he taught me you know a lot of things like for example when we got acquisition offer right how do i go about that and he was like okay well here's how you think about it at the end of the day like just look at all these options help me break out things and something that i really value now is asking people who've gone through the process because a lot of the big mistakes i made early on was just me making a wrong assumption and some of those literally

Starting point is 00:45:36 could cost almost a hundred thousand dollars with the like loss um and where if somebody was there saying oh you know just think about this before you make this decision, it would have saved me a lot. And so now I value anything I do now. I try to find somebody who's done it before and get their perspective before I go into it. Again, it's fine to make mistakes early on, because when you, especially when you're moving a thousand miles an hour early on, like you have 50 things in your head, you will slip up. But that's something that like I would say is super core to me today, especially with more responsibility. Because if I make a mistake now, it's way more detrimental than making it a month ago or two years ago. I think those are very wise words.

Starting point is 00:46:11 One of the regrets that I have in my 20s was the fact that I didn't go and ask for more help from mentors. I wanted to pretend like I had it all figured out or, you know, just kind of be the cool guy or the owner or whatever, whatever, rather than surrounding myself with fantastic people that knew a whole lot more than me that could teach me, you know, and, and that's why I think it's one of the coolest sayings is like a millionaires, they go and they try to figure out solutions. Billionaires ask who has the solution. Oh, yeah. I don't think they do any work at that point.

Starting point is 00:46:49 There's no calls. Right. So, you know, for me, it's getting into that billionaire mindset of who do I know that has the solution to this instead of trying to figure out everything on my own. Yeah. And so that was a shift for me, you you know between my 20s and 30s of like trying to just figure it all out 100 even right now it's a fine balance so you don't want to ask for too much help right but you also should ask help if you're spending way more excessive time and and sometimes it's as easy as i care what you think about that right and a lot of times i try to

Starting point is 00:47:20 provide value to anybody who's giving me help um just so's not one way. But yeah, it's a fine balance. And again, you sometimes have to learn the hard way. I've done that more times. So before we wrap up, tell us about, you gave a TED Talk. What was the process in getting on that stage and how was

Starting point is 00:47:40 the experience? It's funny because actually I got invited to one in February, so I'll be giving my second one, which is cool because the first one i did was in 2020 it was right it was literally a few months before to the tiktok madness which was right before any big success we had um and and um the process that was pretty extra straightforward like i had given a talk at the at the local university at the university University of California, Santa Cruz or something. And they saw it and like, hey, we'd love to have you give another talk.

Starting point is 00:48:08 And it was just about, I think the theme was like rebooted. And it was about stepping back from what's going on in reflection. And it was a perfect time because just a few months ago, it was the competition that we lost where I told you, like when I went in, I thought we're going to win this. And I honestly put all the stakes on it. Like if we win, our company's good. If we lose, it's over. lost where um i i told you like when i went in i thought we're gonna win this and i it i honestly put all the stakes on it like if we win our company's good if we lose it's over and when we

Starting point is 00:48:30 lost and i'll never remember the state because when they announced the winners they go alphabetical our letter is k for condom and i record everything for social media so i was filming starting from a b c d e f g h i j the next letter is going to be K. Guess what happened? They skipped to M. So my phone just like, my heart sank. My phone is going down. Everybody's looking at me and I literally thought it was over. But what that really taught me is like, you know,

Starting point is 00:48:55 it turns out we lost, had nothing to do with our company. We just didn't follow the instructions right. It turns out this was about talking to as many, because it was a fake currency. Whoever had the most fake currency wins. So it required talking to as many, because it was a fake currency. Whoever had the most fake currency wins. So it required talking to as many fake investors to get as much currency because they can only give you $5 each.

Starting point is 00:49:11 And we focused all our eggs on a few baskets when instead we should have talked to as many people as possible. So be more concise, fast elevator pitches, don't focus too much. And it was as simple as missing that, which caused everything else. Because we ended up making,

Starting point is 00:49:23 we got about to the accelerator like five months later which was even more prestigious they told us like you probably could have done higher there but point is it taught me to step back from anything sometimes when you're so narrowed down you're going tunnel vision or something um you lose focus of the bigger picture and so being able to take breaks when you're stressed doesn't matter you have to set a reminder if you have to do that set a reminder step down make sure you're on track things are going well you go a long way and i used to do that, set a reminder. Step down, make sure you're on track. Things are going well. You go a long way. And I used to think that would be a waste of time taking small breaks, but no.

Starting point is 00:49:52 Like stepping out and doing a 20-minute walk, which I talk about. It's called the creativity walk in my TED Talk, where anytime I'm stressed, anytime something's going wrong, I go for a walk to clear my mind. Or I go on to my treadmill. And I think harder than I go back to action, right? And that's the whole theme of the talk. And it was based off what I consider one of the biggest failure I've ever faced as an entrepreneur. Obviously, there's more severe failure that I've faced,

Starting point is 00:50:12 but essentially your first big failure just sticks with you. It's like the first time feeling what it takes to get slapped by the face really hard. Got it, got it. So last couple of questions. Where's a great place to follow you is it instagram tiktok snapchat where's your what are the socials that the listeners can yeah just like my first last name emin shayko on instagram tiktok facebook um snapchat honestly there and if you want to check out my company it's katama on the same pages so you'll easily search us up

Starting point is 00:50:44 on google we'll drop it in this show just make sure to get you some follows get you company that's caught him on the same pages. So you'll easily search this up on Google. Awesome. We'll drop it in the show to make sure to get you some follows, get you some shares. Last but not least, what is a piece of advice that you'd give to a young entrepreneur or even old entrepreneur that is trying to get started, get things off the ground? Obviously, you've done a lot of bootstrapping in your short career. What's the best piece of advice you give to that person? There's two, but I'm going to stick to the one that's literally just get started. Because when we started, I was 18. My co-founder was 16.

Starting point is 00:51:18 We had no idea how to do it. No tools or resources. But we made a promise to each other. It doesn't matter what we have to do. We're going to figure it out. And we just got started. And we failed so so many times but look where we're at now and especially if you're a student and you're young and if you're privileged enough to still have your parents be paying for a lot of your stuff what's the worst case there's no worst case just you wasted a

Starting point is 00:51:38 little bit of time you were going to waste that time anyways going to the movies and hanging out with your friends like the biggest like literally the worst case actually in failing is learning and eventually if you fail enough you're gonna succeed because you're gonna run out of failures love it love it i mean thank you so much for your time thank you for flying out here making the the podcast happen until next time

Next Level Pros - #60: Amin Shaykho: Founder Of Kadama, Forbes 30 Under 30, Over 1 Million Users

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